Terry Prone: More questions than answers after Mary Lou's interview on Brian Stanley 

Originally published in the Irish Examiner.

A clever Sinn Féin person came up with the idea of referring the Brian Stanley issue to An Garda Síochána. A clever person who wasn’t nearly clever enough. 

The cleverness lies in the chilling effect of anything being hospital-passed to the policing system. It buys time, like a Dealz version of sub judice. 

The more fearful within the fourth estate would figure nobody can say anything at the moment until the guards have decided whether to refer stuff onto the DPP, and that could take months. Enough months to close the topic down on mainstream media, allowing Sinn Féin to get on with its recovery task.

But it wasn’t nearly clever enough. It immediately led the forensic/chronology-minded to go: “Hang on a second. If it was that serious, why wasn’t it referred to the forces of the law three months ago?” 

It specifically led RTÉ’s magnificent Mary Wilson to ask why the complainant against Brian Stanley hadn’t taken their issue to the guards themselves, creating bafflement on how the Sinn Féin leadership could take it upon themselves to forward a complaint from within their ranks to the gardaí.

Inevitably, this leads to further puzzlement about the level of permission given by this person who had chosen not to involve the gardaí themselves.

No matter which way you look at it, this one drops the inevitable cliché on Mary Lou’s early morning Monday appearances; that the interviews raised more questions than they answered.

As a communications case study, this entire episode is a doozy.

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